Police Keep Violating the U.S. Constitution With Illegal Traffic Stops | Hacker News Reader

Police Keep Violating the U.S. Constitution With Illegal Traffic Stops

jalopnik.com

49 pointst2310 comments

It's really simple, until police officers are _personally_ held both criminally (fraud, attempted kidnapping, theft, etc) and civilly liable they will keep doing this. That they literally recorded themselves in this case is a nicety, usually their recording devices have "malfunctioned" or "forgotten to be turned on".

But it's entirely moot, as the Supreme Court invented "qualified immunity", a concept with no basis in law, that allows a cop to just say "I didn't think I was breaking the law" to get them out of more or less anything. QI is especially BS because police can arrest, charge, fine, and/or imprison you for breaking a law you were unaware of. Why are non-law enforcement officers required to have perfect knowledge of all the laws that may be relevant when the people ostensibly enforcing the law are explicitly allowed, and encouraged to not know the law?

Almost every government worker has some sort of “immunity”, it’s not exactly something special cops have. Elected politicians have it, government workers have it. Hell, private employees have immunity when doing their jobs. If I make some mistake on a spreadsheet at work and my company loses $1B thankfully I’m not on the hook for it.

There is usually some threshold upon which “errors” moves beyond doing their job into personal actions that constitute a crime.

I’m all for cops being held accountable when their “errors” rise to the threshold of malfeasance and intention law breaking, but when it comes to subjective things like traffic stops, fining or imprisoning cops for every mistake seems unworkable.

I want this argument to work, but when cops aren't fined or imprisoned for every mistake, but have the effective capability to fine or imprison others for mistakes just as small, the end result represents an asymmetric imbalance of power that serves as an exploitable attack vector. Like any other exploit the options are patch it or let the exploiters run wild.

I can't think of a word for this post besides unhinged. The police aren't exercising an asymmetric power imbalance when they arrest you they're doing their JOB. That is the service they provide, that if you're doing something illegal and you're in a city where they're not redtaped to death then they come and stop you. The fact they do their job isn't a strike against them.

It seems like this response uses the word job as a justification, but I'm not particularly convinced. I can hire a hitman and that has no bearing on what they're doing is ethical. Conversely, people do nice things for each other outside of jobs all the time. It seem to me that making something a job has no relevancy at all in this discussion. There are a million ways to argue for cops, but repeating that it's a job ain't one of them.

It actually is if you don't ignore the context of the job while comparing it with something of false equivalence. Police work for the government and by extension the citizenry to enforce laws the citizenry passed. Is there a reason you feel laws against things like theft and murder are immoral or reasons why you feel sometimes victims of these crimes shouldn't be supported by law enforcement agencies? Because when you refer to police doing their job as an attack vector you're referring to them enforcing laws that society decided were important and so I think the onus is on you to explain which laws you feel are immoral or which victims are undeserving of justice and why.

It's not unworkable when we see other countries in the West with frameworks that prevent such routine abuse. The fact of the matter is that much of the people in the country want police performing such actions.

Willful abuse? Sure. Some cop in Canada was just convicted of assault and jailed (I believe). But like the US, not following protocols is usually corrective punishment and then penalties such as unpaid leave if it's not fixed.

I don't know of any country where cops are charged criminally for a search that the courts toss out because it wasn't done correctly.

If fining them is a problem because the variance of “how much they are fined” is too large, what if uh, had an external organization evaluate the probability of each officer getting fined and use that to price insurance that they have to buy? That way the variance is reduced, and they have a direct monetary incentive to have habits which reduce the estimated probability that they get fined (or, rather, the expected value of how much they get fined for) ?

Yup. I lost any respect for Vero Beach, Florida police when they used a pretextual stop - dim, not missing, license plate light - to ask that they search my car. I'm a dull SOB but that pushed the wrong button and I declined. With all the foofaraw those clowns wasted 45 minutes of my life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com